Why I STOPPED Trying to Fight Nature and You Should Too.

We have made everything hard in our mind because that’s what we have been taught and yes to be fair, getting anything done, does require change, but that change doesn’t have to be done in a painful way. That change can be done in a sustainable and enjoyable way. You swim with the current of life instead of swimming against it.

Dismissing natural requirements such as sleep as bad, sexuality as bad, desiring to have fun as bad, is a uniquely human phenomenon. No other being fights with natural needs as much as humans do and takes pride in the same while not necessarily making their lives better doing so. 

An average animal generally lives a happier life compared to an average human, even with all the life threats around. Animals, live and die in nature without complicating their lives. We slave away our entire lives doing things we hate, thanks to society’s invention of a collective delusion called money and then end up giving all the money in medical bills to die alone in a hospital, away from our loved ones instead of being surrounded by them.

Animals are not a lower birth, ironically, we are just finding patterns to assert our own superiority because we think, while that thinking is the very thing that leads to pain.

Why is it that the more “intelligent” we become, the unhappier we are. And they say humans are supposed to be more evolved??

In a world that often praises the relentless pursuit of overcomplication and making things HARDER than they need to be, the ancient Taoist principle of Wu-Wei invites us to consider a different path—one where less effort can yield more substantial results.

Wu-Wei, often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action,” is not about inactivity but about finding the most effective way to achieve our goals with minimal struggle.

This philosophy advocates for actions that are in harmony with the natural flow of life, promoting a graceful approach to personal and professional challenges

But first, who first came up with the concept of Wu-Wei?

Central to Taoism are the teachings of Laozi. He was a semi-legendary figure believed to have lived in the 6th century BCE. This places him contemporaneously with Confucius in China and not long before Socrates in Greece.

It is believed that he first spoke about the concept of Wu-Wei, which advocates for ‘action through non-action,’ and challenges our conventional views on effort and control, suggesting that the most effective form of action often arises from surrender to the natural flow.

In, the simplest terms Wu-Wei means you don’t try to swim upstream when the river is going downstream.

I remember the first time I unconsciously, started practising the art of “effortless doing.” Surprisingly, it was at school 😉

Back in the 1990’s in India, if you did not do homework, as a punishment, the class teacher forced you to write 200 times in your notebook this particular sentence – “I will not forget to do my homework again” or something stupid along those lines.

After going through such stupid exercise a few times, I finally realized there was a hack.

Instead of writing the whole sentence “I will not forget to do my homework again” two hundred times, I figured there was a far easier way.

I realized if I wrote ONLY the letter “I” vertically first from top to down, two hundred times, and then I wrote ONLY “will” first from top to down, two hundred times, and then same for “not” (and so on), I would be completing the task way relatively faster and effortlessly than anyone else, who wrote the entire sentence, one by one, two hundred times.

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself!

I was naturally Wu-Wei! I was naturally involved in the art of effortless doing!

But as I grew up, I was taught the importance of hard work and forgot everything about going with the flow.

I was made to believe, it was lazy to go with the flow, there was much more glory in making things as hard as possible.

In my last book, “Unlearn: A Practical Guide to Business & Life”, in the end I made a list of things that caused me pain in my professional and personal life and wrote about the “unlearning” of these things.

 Most of these things were those that I was trying to “push through” unnaturally even if it meant going against what was unfolding in my life naturally, and using extreme will power to do even what I did not enjoy.

I did all this because I was PROMISED by historically worshipped motivational bros like Light Bulb Tommy (the inventor who wants you to spend 10,000 years failing) and Sir Hapoleon Nil (author of the profound book, Don’t Think, Just Grow Thick) that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Well, at the end of an EXTREMELY long tunnel when I found a shining load of crap instead, I realized, it was time to let go of all the nonsense I had been fed in my life by society for 35 plus years.

The problem wasn’t that nothing good had come in my life, the problem was that nothing good had come the way I imagined it.

The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t blessed, the problem was that I ultimately realized my blessings had a very limited correlation with “hard work.”

This in itself would not be such an issue had we not been brainwashed with the idea that we make our own fates. The problem is that we are scared of accepting that so little is under our own control.

It is then I realized that instead of making nature bend to my whims and fancies, perhaps I should stop fighting nature.

How to Apply Wu-Wei or the Art of Effortless Doing? You will find it in the next post from my book “How to Cope with A Brutal World.